Remember Netscape - the very web browser which once enjoyed a major browser market share and which was nearly killed by Microsoft's anti-competitive practices by its release of Internet Explorer ? The very Netscape navigator whose code base was then released as open source and which lead to the eventual development of the stable and increasingly popular Mozilla and then Firefox? Guess what, it has re-incarnated as Netscape Navigator ver 9.0.

Contrary to popular belief, Netscape Navigator was not dead though its popularity was severely diminished. One of the reasons for it to fall out of favor with the net users was because its succeeding versions accumulated a lot of unnecessary bloat. I remember using Netscape navigator ver 4.0 which was really sleek and then when I upgraded to the next major version, it some how did not live up to the mark of its predecessor.

The new Netscape navigator has shed a lot of fat and is now much sleeker. It is based on Firefox and has a couple of unique features built-in such as :

Integration with Netscape portal which is now a social bookmarking site (Yes Netscape website is now a social bookmarking/voting site aka digg.com ). From within the web browser without visiting Netscape, you can share and vote for web pages that you find interesting.

Read the latest news directly from your browser.

Netscape navigator fixes commonly mis-typed URLs for you.

And the highlight of ver 9 release is a link pad (Similar to what you have in Opera) which allows you to save interesting links without cluttering your bookmarks.

Netscape ver 9 is available for Linux apart from that for Windows and Mac OSX and is a modest 8.9 MB download. The minimum system requirements are 256 MB RAM and around 100 MB disk space.

If you are interested, you can download Netscape Navigator 9 and take it for a test drive.